The Almagest Database

A Quick Tour of Almagest

Almagest is used by a large number of courses, as well as a variety of faculty research projects. It holds the image collections of the Art & Archaeology Dept's Visual Resources Center, the Architecture Dept, the Classics Courseware Project, Saskia Scholars Resource, and several private faculty image and media collections.

Users can search for images and other media objects by any associated metadata. The metadata structure is very rich, allowing collection editors to build as much or as little semantic depth into their collections as they desire.

Images and other multimedia objects can be organized into presentations, which can be viewed as Web pages or exported to Powerpoint.

Presentations are built using the popular Almagest LectureBuilder tool, which provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for arranging images and pages. It includes a search tool and a clipboard tool.

A Look Ahead to Almagest 4

Almagest 4 presents the user with a personal "workspace" in which they can store and organize their personal media collection and bookmark other collections.

Users can browse collections, and search for images and other media objects within or across collections.

Images and other multimedia objects can be provided with rich metadata structures. Here we see a listing of metadata for the image collection associated with an Architecture course.

Presentations are built using a new, easier and more flexible version of the popular LectureBuilder tool, which provides a drag-and-drop interface for arranging images and pages, an integrated search tool and clipboard. The new tools are built on a powerful Web 2.0 framework.